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Kollan Mango: A native Kerala Mango
Many of the native Kerala mangoes like Kollan, Killichundan,
Moovandan... are fast disappearing from the plate and from the backyard
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To write on mangoes this summer is to bite the
cliché and let the juice run over my laptop. However clichéd another piece on
mangoes sounds, the fruit continues to seduce and compels you to write anyway.
Every year, an old essay in my college textbook pops up in my mind and urges me
to eat the fruit in the prescribed manner: it tells you to rub the fruit gently
and then knock off the end and suck at it till the pulp runs down your gullet
in a steady flow. More importantly, the brave should take the whole mango into
their mouth, the essay recommends, and chew the meat and skin and then eject
the stone out or some other blah. The only mango that I dare attempt to put
whole in my mouth is perhaps the uppumanga (small mango in brine) or even
smaller kannimanga (the eye-shaped, baby mangoes plucked when their seeds are still
tender). Last weekend, a rose-ringed parakeet in my mother’s backyard, filled
with the fruit both standing and fallen, showed me yet another way to eat mangoes.
My mother said it was a puliyan (a sour one) only good for kaddumanga (a hot
mango pickle) but the unconcerned parakeet was merrily breakfasting on it. She
was a picky eater and went about pecking the fruit carefully so as not to drop
it. Her acrobatics while eating the mango is only for a yogi or the flexible. When
she had stripped it clean, the seed was still dangling from the tree. That’s
another feat that needs some measure of expertise.
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| A rose-ringed Parakeet (female) breakfasts on the Kollan |
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| She's left only the seed dangling on the tree |
If I went back in time as far as my memory
stretches, summer holidays were always liberally seasoned with mangoes, albeit
the less exotic ones. It is only in the last decade or so that the exotic
varieties from other states, like the alphonso, badami, chaunsa began to flood
the Kerala market and my apartment in the city. My memories of mangoes are
intertwined with the ordinary native varieties like the moovandan, kappa,
kilichundan, pullichi, kolan etc... the neelam was as exotic as it could get. Some
of these native varieties have almost become extinct as people prefer the
sweeter exotic ones and these trees may be only found in old mango groves.
Though a great effort is being made by a few state government agricultural
farms to preserve and propagate about a dozen of the native varieties, they are
no longer seen in the urban supermarkets. But back then, their flavours persisted
in every dish whether it was the chutneys, the curries or the pickles. The
abundance of mangoes in the backyard was fruitfully put to use and the native mango
would surface at every meal. I am not the only one in my family who writes
about the surfeit of mangoes in our diet during summer. My great aunt before me
did too and she put down in her memoirs about the mango curries that were
served up during her summer holidays. She impishly wrote that their cook would
serve a wide variety of dishes: if it was manga and chakkakurru curry (mango
and jackfruit seeds) on one day and it would be chakkakurru and manga curry
(jackfruit seeds and mango) the next.
Every house in Kerala would turn industrious in
mango preservation, to stretch the taste of mango all the year around. After
much of the ripe mangoes were chopped up and eaten, the excess on the trees
would be plucked in the unripe state, to be pickled or sun dried. The raw
mangoes slivered and salted would be placed on palm mats and left out in the
open. As the days passed under the hot sun, the mango would shrivel into
brownish curls-the drier they got the better the adamanga (dry mango) pickle
would taste. The small baby mangoes with tender seeds called kannimanga would
be left to loll in brine in large Chinese urns called cheenabharanni. I always
thought Kannimanga and the uppumanga was a ploy to tempt us to snack on mangoes
between meals too. As soon as we put our hands into the urn to grab a few, my
grandmother would mock-scold us, and we would run away with brine dripping down
our elbows. Some of the elders who preferred rice for breakfast would start the
day with pazhakanji (old leftover rice gruel) with a potent chilly called
kanthari squished into the gruel and uppamanga on the side. It was relished and
enjoyed and quite the reason that many of that generation had huge pot-bellies.
A lot of kanji and a bit of booze can grow you a big, round stomach they say.
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| Kadumanga pickle (a hot mango pickle) with vegetable pilaf |
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| The mynah wondering whether to go for the sour one or not |
The adults always found one way or the other to slip
mangoes into every dish possible. There was the mango pulissery, mango and
prawn curry, mango and fish curry, mango in the avial, mango pachadi and my
favourite pazhamanga curry (ripe mango curry). For the pazhamanga curry one
cannot use any exotic variety from the other states but must adhere to the small
ripe yellow native variety for that fibrous, earthy taste. The best thing about
this curry is that you can pop the whole mango in your mouth and relish its
sour -chilly-sweetness exactly like it was recommended in my textbook. On a
sultry day, a bit of rice and pazhamanga curry, is a feast for the Gods.
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| Pazhamanga curry and rice |
Text and photographs by Minu Ittyipe
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